DoD CIO Honors Innovation, Modernization in IT

WASHINGTON, Nov. 30, 2017 —
More than 20 individuals and teams across the Defense Department were honored today for cyber and information technology excellence in a Pentagon ceremony.

“I'm excited about the awards here this year. ... We have a lot of great people who did wonderful things with their talent to further the mission of the Department of Defense,” said John A. Zangardi, DoD’s acting chief information officer.

Calling the awards justly earned, Zangardi noted that senior DoD leadership is focused on increasing the department’s lethality, capability and effectiveness, and IT is an area it is focusing the reform management group on to deliver more capability at lower costs.

IT is an area that could deliver capability to the warfighter, Zangardi said.

Future Challenges

“There are lots of challenges ahead of us in the years to come in IT,” he added. “We need to stay on top of it because the marketplace … is changing very quickly.”

Zangardi said technology is constantly evolving and DoD must be on its toes.

“More importantly, we need to make sure that we don’t lose sight of putting bureaucracy in the way of delivering information technology for our warfighters. We should go in with [the attitude of] ‘Yes, we could do that, let’s figure out how to do it,’” he said.